Notes from a talk on use of colour in science and how current methods are fairly inaccessible.

colour_accessibility.md

Notes from a talk on use of colour in science and how current methods are fairly inaccessible.

NB. Saying colour-blind is somewhat derogatory (also generally incorrect because achromatopsia is super-rare), so the better way is colour-vision impaired or, perhaps, spectrally-challenged.

Colour vision impairment simulators: www.vischeck.com http://colororacle.org

This site seems to have lots of different information and tools, but is also extremely chaotic: mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind

In R:

• RColorBrewer has some option called display.brewer.all(colorblindFriendly = TRUE)
• the viridis package has several colour palette options (magma, plasma, inferno)
• colorspace::terrain_hcl() ((for some reason my notes say I don't like this, so might not look very good))
• dichromat package

In Python:

• brewer2mpl
• matplotlib

Github for colormap, apparently the people behind viridis and matplotlib.

General tips from the talk:

• Blue is good, sky blue is good for highlighting
• Use magenta, vermillion, or orange instead of red
• Never use red on black
• Avoid green -> use blue-green instead

Avoiding Color - Nature Methods paper

Guidelines for preparing color figures for everyone including the colorblind - Pharmacological Research paper